Posts Tagged ‘pvr’

ZoneMinder is a free open-source PVR for security cameras with plenty of features such as zone-based motion detection, support for network cameras with various protocols, etc. The install instructions on the program’s website are a bit misleading for a new install, so we’re going to do a step-by-step install walk-through here. This is based on the 1.27 release of ZoneMinder and the Server release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. On my first install, I used a low power machine with an Atom D525 processor, and that wasn’t nowhere near the capability needed for a single network camera, so I had to change the hardware to something beefier. Take that into consideration before starting the process. In the end, I used a small DELL desktop with an Intel C2D E6300 and it worked out great for 3 ACTi network cameras.

Let’s start with deploying Ubuntu on the machine you’ll use to record video. I did a base install with the basic Ubuntu server, OpenSSH and Samba packages, no X and no LAMP stack (this will be installed later). Configure disk as needed during the install.

After the system is operating, then we’ll add the repository for ffmpeg. With Ubuntu 14.04, they’ve switched to libav and there’s no package for ffmpeg, so we’ll add it from the official PPA. Issue these commands:

Define a secure password for your MySQL install. After it completes, we’ll continue by retrieving the ZoneMinder and building the package. Let’s clone the repository under /opt and build the .deb package for installation (note that the ubuntu1204 link is not misspelled):

After installing the package, if it complains about dependencies, do ‘sudo apt-get -f install’ followed by ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure zoneminder’ to correct the situation. At the time of writing, this came out clean. Now we’re going to make the web interface available via Apache:

This should make the web interface available through http://host/zm. Beware that this is a standard install with all defaults, so it’d be recommended to follow standard procedures to tighten down Apache’s config as well as MySQL and the system itself.

From here, standard ZoneMinder configuration applies, so just add your cameras as desired. There’s a good starter tutorial for motion detection here.